Stubblog

Give it in little projects to the little guys.

As I’ve said in the past, government should concentrate on providing data and let it’s citizens build the sites they want out of that.

Some would say that the sites built wont cover the needs of everybody, but then how is that different from today?

Over the weekend a bunch of people got together for Hack The Government Day and proved what can be done when data is free, using screen scraping, they built projects against the data held at companies house, the job center, an API for searching schools, a site for finding a local dentist, a site to review your MPs voting record and a site that took Sport England’s Active Places and improved it using Google Maps. Active Places was developed using £5 million of lottery money.

The sooner this kind of data becomes free, the sooner we start to get these kind of sites available.

I’m coming to the conclusion that (at least) one of my side projects is dead, http://www.whos-playing.com is a site I wrote to help people manage 5 a side football teams, it lets you pick teams and rate your team mates to help keep the teams fair.

The idea was to have the site free while people beta tested it, then charge people to use it once I was happy that it worked Ok, but no-one wants to use it when it’s free, so I doubt people would want to pay for it.

It’s been live for about 6 months and has gained less than 100 users users, none of them active. I’ve received 2 emails regarding problems on the site, both of which were fixed in quick order, after that, neither user carried on using the site.

I tried engaging the team organisers whenever I fixed major bugs, or improved the interface in such a way that might make it usable for them, but I rarely got even a log in from them.

I’ve tried gaining users by joining various 5-a-side groups on Facebook, but it’s hard not to look spammy when you’re the most active user on there. Some people signed up, but never got any further.

One of the users works for one of the major 5-a-side football pitch providers in the UK, but his experience of the site didn’t get any further than trying to invite a few players to join his team. I’ve even emailed the FA, but heard nothing back.

So now it’s beginning to look like the site is a dud, no active users even when the site is free, even when some of the users who signed up are your friends, it doesn’t appeal to people who hang out on groups aimed at the subject it covers.

So it looks like whos-playing.com is in injury time, all the substitutes have been played, the referee has checked his watch and unless something happens soon I might have to blow the final whistle.

I’ve had a bit to say about the state of travel information online, and regular readers will know what I think the solution is. So when I heard that a company in the North West had been awarded a contract to overhaul SYPTE’s online information website I was quite excited, maybe now we’d get a decent service that worked on a wider range of devices, with better maps and, dare I say it, an API we can use.

That excitement started to fade as soon as I clicked on a link to Rippleffect’s website, it’s flash. If, like me, you work in an environment where you have no rights to install software on your windows machine you’re immediatly stuck. Flash has it’s place, but it’s not front and center, it’s not the first thing your customers should see (or not, in my case)

Because I have other reasons to be here, I made the effort to find the link to the non-flash version and looked to see if there was any more info on the project. There wasn’t any specific info on the SYPTE project, but they have done work for Merseyrail. I’ve had a look at the hourney planner and I immediatly saw the URL http://www.merseyrail.org/noflash.php?mode=not_installed, but it seems to work Ok on a non-flash enabled browser (Chrome in my case, see above). However when I look at the site with a Flash enabled browser … I can’t see what it uses Flash for, certainly not the journey planner, so the user experience is needlessly downgraded before I even start.

I had high hopes when I saw that a smaller, local agency rather than a large behemoth had won the work, but now I’m not so hopeful that what we’ll end up with will be any better than what’s there at the moment, but prove me wrong Rippleffect, please prove me wrong!!

www.whos-playing.com is my latest web app, and here is the announcement I made over the weekend about it’s soft launch.

Who’s Playing is a new service for people who organise after work, social 5-a-side football games. It aims to take the slog out of emailing a whole bunch of people, collating the responses and finally,
picking two sides that are equal, perhaps the hardest part of making the game enjoyable for everyone.

Organisers invite their players to join the site and as part of the short sign up process, players must give themselves a rating, which is used to pick balanced sides. After each game the other players get to
vote on how well they think the other players performed, and this is used to keep the rating accurate and up to date.

To organize a game, the team owner simply chooses a date, time and location and his players are sent an email with all the details and a link to click if they want to play.

Once the game has enough people signed up to play, an organiser can
let Who’s Playing select 2 evenly balanced sides. Once he’s happy with the sides he can mail them to everyone who’s playing.

Who’s Playing is currently undergoing open beta testing, and match organisers are encouraged to sign up for an account so their feedback can incorporated into the site before development is completed.

While use of Who’s Playing is free at the moment, once completed the cost will be just £10 a month (or just 25p a week extra per player if you have 5 players per side, less if you play larger games), new sign
ups that help test the site will be given 3 months free when the site is officially launched.

Read more on the Who’s Playing blog

I’m starting to think that Nintendo wants it’s Wii console to fail, even before it was launched they took a massive gamble not to significantly upgrade the hardware of the machine from their previous platform, the Gamecube, and invest instead in a novel controller. This gamble however paid off and the Wii now has a massive install base. The challenge Nintendo now has is to keep those people interested in their platform, keep them feeding the quarters as they used to say.

The modern day equivelent to feeding an arcade machine 10p’s all day is downloadable content, be it in the form of Rock Band’s downloadable songs, XBos Live’s Live Arcade or extra missions for games like Grand Theft Auto. So far the Wii has been really dissapointing as far as online gaming is concerned. Wikipedia has a list of all the games that support WiiConnect24, but I don’t count sharing scores as online play, and many of them are not available outside of Japan.

The latest game to shun dlc & online play is Rock Band, but here in the UK at least it seems they’re going to try and recoup that lost income by massivly over charging for the game itself in the first place. Even at Game’s discounted prices, it’s still twice the price American gamers pay.

Apart from the cost of the game, I’m not being too harsh on Harmonix/EA here because I feel the problem is the platform’s, with it’s feeble amount of storage and complete mess of a friend system that requires each player to know 2 – 12 digit numbers for every other player in the game in order to be able to play against each other.

This is a quick test, adding a blog entry from IMified.